Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — The Hour I Come Off
The hour had been the second bell and then it had been the third, and at some point in the night, without Rahimi writing it anywhere, it had become the fourth.
Rahimi stood at the head of the boarding plate with the slate under his arm and did not take it out. There was nothing on it he needed to look at. The three things that were wrong with his ship at the second bell were the three things that were wrong with her now, and he had spent the interval discovering that two of them were going to stay wrong, and deciding, without saying so to anybody, that he could live with the pair of them for a year.
The third was the staging tower. It was bolted to her after face and it should have come off the day before yesterday.
The ganger came up the apron at him with his hands out of his pockets, which meant he had been sent and did not like it.
“I haven’t got the bolt holes signed.”
“There’s nobody to sign them and there won’t be one this side of the quarter.” Rahimi did not move the slate. “Off in ten. I’ll take the holes as they are and sign them in my own name, not yours.”
The ganger looked at the tower and then at the after face under it, and then at the price on his own leaf.
“It’s a twenty-minute job to do it right.”
“Then do the ten I need and leave the rest of it on the wall.”
The ganger went. Rahimi took his eye down the length of his own after face once, along the frame of the new hatch and the line of bolt holes under it, and then along the apron at the row.
The ship was a converted survey hull off the boundary work, long and low and plain, a bay aft and a run of drum cradles down her port side, and a paint line along her flank that had been touched up in three different quarters and did not match itself anywhere.
The frame was not painted. It had been cut in the second quarter and framed in the third and the paint had gone into the package that got cut, along with the deck lighting aft of the bulkhead and one of the two ranging cradles he had asked for. He had signed the package as it came back. There had been an argument to be had about it and he had done the arithmetic on the argument — four days, at least, and the four days were the difference between going out on this window and going out on the next one — and had not had it.
It was one of the faults he had decided to carry rather than miss the window.
The staging came down in sections from the head. The first section went onto the apron plates with a noise that stopped a barrow crew and they looked up and went back to it.
Wells came down the plate with a board under her arm. She had been along the after face under the staging, looking up at the frame of the new hatch, and she came back to the foot of the plate and stopped there.
“I want the after bay lit before we’re off the wall.”
“You’ll have it when the fitters are off her.”
Wells waited. In six days he had learned that she would wait.
“And they’re off her when I say.”
“Then say.”
“Ten minutes.”
Rahimi went up the plate past her without anything else.
Inboard, the port was open and the light came in off the apron along the deckhead and lay on the taped cable bundle. It was a hand thick and it ran the length of the overhead and went in through a hole that had been made for it that month, and the tape on it was three colours because it had been done three times. That was the other one he had decided to carry.
Rahimi had asked, in the second quarter, for the run to go under the deck plating. The works office had priced it and the price had come back with the paint and the lighting and the second cradle inside it, and one of the four had to go, and he had let the cable go because a cable a hand thick along a deckhead is ugly and a boat has to sit on something.
Going past, he reached up and put his hand flat on it. Cold, and solid, and three colours of tape under his palm, and it was going to be there for four years.
The boards were forward of the port on the starboard side, in what had been the survey office and was now the office because there was only one.
Halloway had them up when Rahimi came in and went on with the one under his hands.
“Bay’s dark till they’re off her.”
“They’re off her in ten.”
“Then it’s dark for ten.” Halloway put one finger on the second board and moved it down two lines and left it there. “That’s not the ten I mind.”
Rahimi looked where the finger was. The after ranging gear had come up on the board at the second bell as a fault and had come back green at the third when a man had gone aft and put his hand on a connector, and it was amber now, which was worse than either.
“Intermittent.”
Halloway took the finger off the board. “I’d rather have it hard-down. Hard-down I know what I’ve got.”
“Can you find it before the fourth?”
“No.”
“Can you find it in a week?”
“I can find it in a week if I’ve got the bay lit and nobody standing in it.” He said it flatly, and it was not a complaint about the bay. “It’s a connector or it’s the run behind the connector. If it’s the run it’s under the new frame and I’m not opening the new frame at a wall with a tender booked.”
“Then it goes in the book as amber and we work it in the week.”
Halloway wrote it as amber and did not look up again.
Rahimi took the slate out for the first time since the second bell and did not write on it. The crew list was on it and he had been over the crew list eleven times in six days and there were nine names and he had chosen four of them.
Denn had a daughter on the list under his own name: dependent, Sena, age eleven, off a date of record. She was aboard on her father’s entry and not on one of her own.
That was what being signed to the berth and not to the hull had got him.
Rahimi put the slate back under his arm.
The girl was already up. She had gone up the plate ahead of her father with a canvas bag on a strap let out as far as it would go, and she had refused the barrow twice, and she was now standing in the cross-passage at the head of the plate in the exact place where two men needed to come through with the last of the boxes.
The girl saw him and moved before he said anything, and got it wrong, and moved into the other place they needed.
“Aft of the frame,” Rahimi said. “Against the bulkhead. Anywhere in that bay you like till the plate’s up.”
Aft of the frame she went, and put her back against the bulkhead beside the door with the card taped to it in a clerk’s hand where a plate should have been, and stood there with the bag still on her shoulder.
Behind the door somebody was putting shelving up and had been at it long enough to be doing it badly. Rahimi had heard it for two days. It was Halloway, in the hours he was not on the boards, and the shelving was crooked and would stay crooked, and it was going into a bulkheaded-off third of a survey bay that had a card on the door because the plate for it had not been ordered, because nobody in the works office had been able to say what to put on the plate.
Ravn had gone up the plate ten minutes before with the reader in its case under her arm and had not come back down.
Ravn was aft, in the bulkheaded third, with the reader out of the case and on the shelf that was crooked, and she had a lamp of her own because the bay was dark. She went on with the shelf when he put his head in.
“That shelf’s not level.”
“No,” Ravn said. “It’ll do till it isn’t.”
The reader was not the ship’s and never would be. Ravn had taken the case off the barrow with her own hands before the barrow had properly stopped, and had told the man on the barrow, in front of two other people, whose it was, where it was going, and that she had already written the day down.
Nobody had asked her for any of it. She said it anyway.
“Anything you want before the plate goes up,” Rahimi said.
“No.”
Rahimi left her with it.
Wells was at the after rail with a board of her own, going down what had come aboard for her own side of it, and she was two items short and saying so to somebody inboard. Her side of it was the road. Rahimi ran the hull; Wells ranged the roads it went out on, and the outfits that sent boats along them went off what she wrote.
The two items were a spare drum head and the second of the two sealed calibration blanks.
Wells had signed for four blanks in the third quarter and two had come. Rahimi knew this because she had told him twice, once as a fact and once as a thing she was going to keep asking about, and he had done the arithmetic on that too. A blank was a fortnight’s chase through an office that was not going to answer inside a fortnight. Two of them let her check one against the other when a figure came out wrong. One left her nothing to check against.
“You’ll go out with one.”
“And the day I want the second one I’ll want it very much.”
“Is one enough?”
“One’s enough to work on.” Wells wrote something without looking up. “It’s not enough to be wrong with.”
The last pallet came off the hoist at the half.
Rahimi came out to the port and stood at the head of the plate. Denn was there with the tally board flat and his coat over his arm, writing on it, and he did not stop writing.
“Clerk,” Rahimi said down to the apron.
“Master.”
“Write the hour I come off. Not the one on the booking.”
“Both go in the column.”
The clerk turned back to the table. There was a queue of nobody at it and there had been since before the first bell.
At the quarter to the fourth, the ganger’s people were walking the tower up the apron the other way on a trolley with one section riding badly, and the after face was clear, and the bay lit.
“Plate up,” Rahimi said, and put the slate under the other arm first.
The plate came up and swung in and the port hands got the rail across it, and Denn stepped back inboard as it came.
“Aft cleats,” he said down to the apron. “Nothing on the forward pair till the aft are clear.”
The apron hands took the aft cleats off in the order they were on and dropped the eyes onto the plating and stood clear of them. The forward pair stayed where they were. The man at the aft end put his arm up, and then they went.
The tender came in off the far cleats at the fourth bell with her own lamp going and put a line up onto the bow.
“Take her off by the bow and give me the width,” Rahimi said. “There’s staging holes down that side and I won’t have a fender put in one.”
The hull came off the wall slowly and squarely. The apron hands brought the fenders in along the row one at a time behind her as she cleared them, and the berth lamps went out from the ramp end down as the hands came off each set.
Kestrel went out past the far cleats with her port still open and the taped bundle of cable showing along the deckhead inside it and the after bay lit at last, four minutes after it stopped mattering.
Rahimi stayed at the port until they were past the cleats and then went in off it and did not look back down the apron, because there was nothing on the apron that was his any more. Everything he had to answer for was aboard, and he went to look at it.
Halloway had the boards. The after ranging gear was amber.
Aft instead, then, through the cross-passage, and a moment at the door with the card on it. The shelving noise had stopped. Ravn had a lamp on in there and the reader on the crooked shelf and the case open on the deck beside her foot, and she was doing something to it with both hands that did not need doing yet and would need doing in a week.
Sena was still against the bulkhead with the bag on her shoulder.
“You can put that down,” Rahimi said.
Sena thought about it and did not put it down.
“Where.”
Rahimi looked at the bay, which was a third of a bay with a bulkhead across it and shelving up badly on one wall and a deck with nothing on it at all, and no plate on the door, and one lamp.
“Ask your father,” he said, “and if he says he doesn’t know, come and tell me, and I’ll find you somewhere by the morning.”
Rahimi went forward. The bay light was on behind him and the port was still open and would stay open until the outer road, and somewhere aft a man began, badly, to put up another length of shelf.